Even though my pops loved ’em, I’m not really a super huge fan of Westerns. However, if you take that All-American genre and mix it up with the sometimes anti-American sentiments of the French, you get an artistically interesting movie poster art combination.
Jean Mascii is credited with The Dollars of Nebraska while Boris Grinsson did The Man From Laramie (style A) and Stage to Thunder Rock; She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Cattle King are by Roger Soubie.
One of my favorite all-time movie poster artists is the Argentinean illustrator, Osvaldo Venturi — who I didn’t even know existed until a year and a half ago when I stumbled upon his work in The Art of The Modern Movie Poster from The Posteritati Gallery in NYC.
Venturi’s elegant posters from the 1940s and 19450s are more like paintings than one sheets, filled with vivid, swirling bursts of color and large dramatic faces of movie stars (perhaps he was the one who invented the notorious “floating heads“).
The price ranges for these beauties are all over the map from thousands of dollars on eBay to just a couple ten spots on EMoviePoster if you get lucky. So, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, “if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”
Here’s a Belgian movie poster and two Frenchies of The Last Sunset, a 1961 love triangle western starring Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson.
The far one on the right is by famed French horror poster artist, Guy Gérard Noël, and the middle version might be as well, too, but I could not officially confirm as of press time.
ImpAwards has up the new character posters for Little Fockers…
I’ve actually never seen Persona, the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film starring Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, but if it’s even half as cool as these posters than surely it can’t be that depressing.
The UK poster was designed by famed Academy Cinemas linocutter, Peter Strausfeld, and the Belgian version (middle) comes via the impressive MyPosterCollection, which also features a nice selection of Japanese posters.
WARNING: This post is not promoting domestic abuse — but merely just highlighting a few strange illustration quirks from the Let-Me-Slap-Some-Sense-Into-You-Mentality of the 1950s. Funny how they expressed relationship drama back then. Can you imagine how focus groups would react now if they put out a one sheet with Leonardo DiCaprio slugging his female co-star?
In any event, here’s another Movie Poster Smackdown Slapdown! (Le Tumulte is by Boris Grinsson and 99 River Street comes courtesy of Paul Waines at the All Poster Forum, which you should join immediately if you enjoy the wonderful world of movie posters.
Here’s two legends going at it on The Postman Always Rings Twice with Rudy Obrero (USA), Renato Casaro (Italian) — plus the legendary (IMHO) Japanese version.
Movie Poster Museum 